Little has changed for millions across South Asia. If the poor lead lives of grinding poverty, the rich ape the lifestyle of the Mughals. –Photo by AP

Over the years, I have often reflected at the ease with which the British ruled over millions of Indians. Thousands of miles from their island nation, they administered a huge empire with a handful of soldiers and civil servants.

Before them, Muslim raiders from Central Asia and Afghanistan carved out kingdoms across much of India. This process culminated in the mighty Mughal Empire established by Babar in 1526. While it went into decline with Aurangzeb’s death in the early 18th century, it was not until 1857 that this dynasty finally fell.

During this long period of Muslim rule, the actual size of the ruling classes was tiny, especially when compared with the teeming number of their mostly Hindu subjects. So why did not the indigenous Indians simply throw out their foreign rulers? Why did they continue suffering under their rapacious rule?

The answer lies in the fact that their own rulers were just as bad. Without a sense of nationhood, or any connection to their government, they saw no reason to revolt against their new foreign masters.

As Abraham Eraly writes in his The Mughal World: India’s Tainted Paradise: ‘Though the Mughals had imposed on the subcontinent such political unity as had never before existed, and had given it a uniformity of administrative system, court culture, coinage and official language, there was no sense that the subjects of the empire were one people. Nor was there any concept of citizenship, either in the Mughal Empire or in any other Indian state — it was land, not people, that made up the state, and frontiers, indefinite and ever shifting, were always porous. There was an Indian empire; there was no Indian nation.’

With this backdrop, it is easy to see why there was no popular resistance to the encroachments made by European trading companies and their armies. It was the ruling elites who put up whatever resistance was offered. With the cohesion imposed by the Mughals crumbling in the face of repeated Maratha attacks, many welcomed the order that accompanied the British.

Here is Eraly again: ‘The Mughal rule was alien only in the sense that the ruler and his subjects together did not constitute a stable political entity. There was no emotional bond. No sense of nationhood. But then this was true of all medieval Indian kingdoms, Muslim as well as Hindu. The people had no loyalty to their rulers, and the rulers had no regard for their subjects. The people were prey, the rulers predators.’

Little has changed since those days. Granted, the sense of nationhood is now deeply ingrained, but most politicians still regard the people they rule as prey, and the people see their rulers as predators. The only point of contact between the two classes comes at election time. And while in a democracy, politicians are obliged to promise voters the moon, everybody knows these are just hollow pledges.

The public see they are being used and manipulated; politicians are aware they will be able to do little even if they are elected. Because expectations are low, so is the level of governance. Corruption has a long and dishonourable tradition in our part of the world. The venal civil servants of the Mughal era could teach a lesson or two to their present-day successors. Illegal gratification was considered a right attached to public office, and the high standards imposed by the British were a Victorian aberration. Before the advent of the British empire, the East India Company was just as venal as the Mughal bureaucracy.

Eraly quotes Manucci, the 17th century adventurer and mercenary, on Mughal rule: ‘As to their government ... there could be nothing more tyrannical, and ... there are slaves in Turkey whose condition is preferable to the free people in this country.’

As today, the poverty and backwardness the masses endured were not a product of any malign intentions, but sheer incompetence and corruption. Here is Eraly again: ‘In fact, for all the professed high-mindedness of the Mughal emperor, his subjects suffered brutal oppression, though the fault was more in the system — and the tyranny of officials — than in the arbitrariness of the emperor ... [but] the sufferings of the people were a subsidiary concern to him.’

Again, this sounds familiar: our rulers make high-minded pronouncements that have little to do with the reality of everyday life for the masses. What has changed is the gradual growth of the middle class. As they become more affluent, they have a bigger stake in the system, and are therefore more willing to exert pressure on the system to make it work.

Thus, we saw relatively large numbers of the urban middle class join in the lawyers’ movement launched a couple of years ago to restore the chief justice. The rising power of the middle class has coincided with the opening up of the private electronic media, with each reinforcing the other.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the poor suffer a fate pretty much unchanged since the Mughal period. According to Eraly, ‘Half-naked, illiterate, barely scraping out a living, the average Indian in Mughal times had advanced little from the conditions of his ancestors of a thousand or more years before his time. He lived in a dingy, one-room hovel, its floors of beaten earth plastered with cow-dung, with walls of mud and a thatched roof...’

Again, little has changed since then for millions across South Asia. But if the poor lead lives of grinding poverty, the rich ape the lifestyle of the Mughals. With their palatial homes and their callous behaviour towards the poor, they exhibit the same sense of automatic empowerment the elites took for granted under the Mughals.

What has been missing in our ruling class is a sense of duty towards those less fortunate. Owing our first loyalty to our immediate family, and then to the caste or clan, we tend to blame the poor for their poverty. Officials and politicians think only of enriching themselves while they are in office.

As long as they do not address the needs of the poor, our rulers will be unable to command their loyalty. Thus, whenever a military dictator grabs power, the masses just shrug their shoulders and get on with life: after all, one set of predators has been exchanged for another. As the French saying goes, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ (The more things change, the more they stay the same).

irfan.husain@gmail.com